Yahoo, Google and Search Advertising

I bought some shares of Yahoo a few months ago. Here's the logic, and it will be interesting to see if it turns out to be true...

Google absolutely kills Yahoo in search marketing. If some company wants to place ads on a search engine for certain key words, Google simply makes it very easy to do. Yahoo's software for placing and managing ads was terrible - especially if you wanted to manage more than a few keywords (like the big advertisers do). Well, Yahoo just released a new version of their ad placement software in February, and the reports are that it is not yet as good as Google, but it is good enough.

This could be a big windfall to advertisers and of course to Yahoo. Yahoo gets plenty of clicks and searches (my new HP PC has Yahoo Search on the bottom menu bar of Vista). Now they can start to capitalize on this with more ad placements. This revenue should drop nearly straight to the bottom line. For someone buying ads - they just want more clicks to their web site and more sales, and typically are willing to pay the incremental cost of those additional clicks. So everyone wins. Well, maybe not Google, as there may be some amount of pricing pressure that starts to enter this market now that there are two places to buy ad words from...

Comments

Unknown said…
Bob, thanks for the tip AFTER the stock runs up 15%.
- Mike Horowitz, BLSW '96-'98
March 9, 2007 at 12:03 PM
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